A measure for how efficiently an adaptive bitrate (ABR) video stream is delivered and for the quality in which the stream is being presented on the screen of a device can be referred to as a “Quality of Experience” (QoE). QoE is a user-perceived measure, but understanding QoE helps content providers, content distributors, and network operators to provider a better experience for users who stream videos over a network. For instance, understanding QoE may help a network operator to efficiently provision and manage the network in a manner that meets user expectations (e.g., by managing carrier additions, evaluating traffic management solutions, detecting problems with network configurations, and the like). However, monitoring QoE can be a challenge for network operators, since QoE is: (a) subjective (i.e., variable from user to user); and (b) application-specific (i.e., variable from application to application).
Since network operators may not have access to the video streaming applications, user devices, and/or servers used to stream the videos, it may be impossible for the network operators to obtain objective measures of the metrics that influence QoE. As such, the network operators may infer metrics that influence video QoE from passive measurements of the network traffic that delivers the video streams.